Once again I am reminded how amazing it is that this joke of a store put Circuity City out of business. Has anyone ever gotten great tech or even competent tech support from them? My latest treat was calling to see if they sell the cable for a printer I bought there less than a year ago. Simple enough right?
I call the local store…after giving her the model # at least 3 times (it consists of a whopping 2 letters and 3 numbers - write it down dumbass) I get "uhhhh we don’t know, here call this # for the “geek squad.” (When I went "?? your geek squad there can’t figure this out? “uh no sir, sorry” Then why fuck didn’t you say so right off??)
I call the 800 # she gives me. The person that answers has the same difficulty grasping that tough model #. She looks it up wherever on the computer (taking forever to do so) and goes "uhhh I’m not seeing it, let me transfer you to ‘parts’ " - gee silly me I thought this WAS a part, so why didn’t you do that in the first place? And why do you need a seperate entire dept for “parts?” This isn’t a car.
I get transferred to “parts” and someone who’s English is not much better than a newborn’s says she can’t look it up by the model # or anything other than the part #. And for a printer I believe they still sell or did up at least a few months ago when I was there last.
Are you fucking kidding me? Screw that joke of a place. I’ll buy from almost anywhere else next time and I don’t care if I have to drive farther or pay more to do so. They make AT&T support look good.
I’ve heard from many different sources (including actual Best Buy workers) that they workers aren’t placed in the departments their expertise is in. Computer geeks are put in Appliances, home audio geeks are made cashiers, and so on. The idea is that Best Buy is worried that too much geekspeak will scare the customer off. :rolleyes:
Best Buy and Geek Squad are two fairly separate entities. The Geeks have their own chain of command and communication structure, and they’re still trying to figure out how to do a handoff from basic store support to the Geeks, because a lot of the questions people call with are below the Geeks’ minimum level of expertise (such as finding a part that should be sitting on a box on a shelf; that’s what the blue-shirts are for).
Also bear in mind that your printer is now a hopeless antique. Anything that’s older than last week’s special might as well be printing out the dead sea scrolls for all they know.
Just hope you didn’t order it directly from Canon and pay the likely ripoff price. If you ever need pretty much any cable, buy from the link I gave above.
To be honest, it would never occur to me to go to Best Buy for anything that could be described as “tech support.” I would go to Best Buy to buy merchandise - specifically, big ticket items, on which they often have good selection at good prices. (As Noelq points out, they overprice small stuff, which is quite deliberate on their part; they make a pretty margin on people buying a few small things when they buy a big thing.)
I was of the understanding that that’s pretty much the only reason anyone goes there. To buy things. It is called Best Buy, after all.
I’m just curious, how old are you? Are you an older, tech ignorant retiree? That’s the only explanation I can come up with for how you could possibly not have known the cable your printer needed, especially since it came in the box. Printers have used these cables as the standard for something like 15 or more years.
The Consumer Reports blog site, Consumerist, takes great delight in describing an almost daily post of one Best Buy screw-up or another. Today’s post concerns a customer who pre-ordered the Jaws Blue-Ray, went to their local store only to find the staff had sold out all of the pre-orders to walkin customers. It seems it wasn’t just one store doing this, either.
Look, sometimes consumers ask dumb questions – that doesn’t mean they are dumb, it means that they want to make sure they’re doing the right thing. A can see that a consumer might not know what the right cable is to use with their printer: let’s remember that nobody ever went wrong by underestimating the computer and electronics industry’s ability to explain things clearly.
So, I’d cut consumers, in general, a fair amount of slack in knowing whether all USB cables are the same, or if their phone is 4G, or whatever. It’s just simply inexcusable for someone who is paid to sell printers, cell phones, TVs, and all that other crap to be unable to answer a really basic question like this.
Maybe the OP was asking the question in a strange way that made it sound more technical or complex than was required. But someone who works in a Best Buy has the freakin’ responsibility to know that printers take USB cables, TVs take HDMI, and some clothes dryers need to be hooked up to a natural gas line.
Best Buy is fun the way a trip to the toy store is fun. I usually buy my technology there. But if I ever need to know anything useful, I stay as far away from that place as possible.